I'd also like to figure out a way to trigger this kind of behavior in other browsers as well as in IE (using Java Script or Java rather than VB) as not quite everyone uses IE - (but I guess you are not going to give me any more clues on how to do that :-) )
If only there was a portable way to determine in JavaScript that a string can be rendered with the existing fonts, or to enumerate the installed fonts and get some of their properties... we could prompt the user to install some fonts or change their browser settings, or we could autoadapt the CSS style rules, notably the list of fonts inserted in the "font-family:" or abbreviated "font:" CSS properties...
There are limited controls with the CSS "@" keys that allow building "virtual" font names, but not enough to tune the font selections by script or by code point ranges. And Javascript is of little help to paliate.
Certainly there's a need to include in a refined standard DOM for styles the properties needed to manage prefered font stacks associated to a virtual font name (for example, in a way similar to what Java2D v1.5 allows), that can then be referenced directly within legacy HTML <font name="virtualname"> or in CSS "font-family: virtualname" properties (some examples of virtual font names are standardized in HTML: "serif", "sans-serif", "monospace"; Java2D or AWT adds "dialog" and "dialoginput"; but other virtual names could be defined as well like "decorated" or "handscript" or "ocr").
The key issue here is to create documents that refer to font families according to their usage rather than their exact appearance and the limited set of languages and scripts they support.
Another possibility would be to create a portable but easily tunable font format (XML based? so that they can be created or tuned by scripting through DOM?) which would be a list of references to various external but actual fonts or glyph collections, and parameters to allows selecting in them with various priorities. For now this is not implemented in font technologies (OpenType, Graphite, ...) but within vendor-specific renderer APIs (than contain some rules to create such font mappings).
